David Starkey served as Santa Barbara's 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. He's Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty years, he's published 11 full-length collections of poetry with small presses and more than 500 poems in literary journals. His novel Poor Ghost was released March 2024.

Paul Willis, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2011-2013 is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he's been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer's Almanac and nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. His YA Elizabethan time-travel novel, All in a Garden Green, was released in 2020, and he's published an eco-fantasy quartet, 2 collections of creative nonfiction, and 7 collections of poetry.

Chryss Yost is a Santa Barbara Poet Laureate who served from 2013-2015. She was awarded the 2013 Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize and other honors, including Pushcart Prize nominations. She's co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Her collection Mouth & Fruit was published 2014, and her poems have been included in the most popular poetry textbooks in the country and widely anthologized elsewhere. She's a founding faculty member of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference's Poetry Conference.

Enid Osborn served as Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara 2017-2019. Her book When the Big Wind Comes is set in Southeast New Mexico, where she was raised. A Pushcart nominee, her work appears mainly in regional California and Southwest journals. She reads at and produces poetry events on the West Coast. She has a series of self-published, themed chapbooks, and she co-edited the anthology A Bird Black as the Sun / California Poets on Crows & Ravens in 2011.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar was Santa Barbara's Poet Laureate 2019-2021, She's is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, A New Hunger, Rooms Remembered, and These Many Rooms. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and editor of four anthologies. She taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, briefly at UCSB, and is a member of the core faculty at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Her latest collection, Lately: New and Selected Poems was published January 2024.

Emma Trelles is the 9th Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, 2021-2023) and a 2023 recipient of an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. In 2022, she was named one of 22 Poet Laureate Fellows across the country by the Academy of American Poets. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, she's the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and a finalist for Foreword-Indies poetry book of the year. She's writing a new collection of poems, Courage and the Clock.

Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet, author, and speaker. She's the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara. Born and raised in South-Central Los Angeles, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA from UC Santa Cruz. She's a 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her latest poetry collection is Bird Forgiveness, 2018.